Given “I adopted the diet myself in 2010”, I assume that’s the option that the poster implicitly favors, and the question is why more people do not do the same.
and the question is why more people do not do the same
I find the whole idea of diets, as normally presented, weird. There is a cultural, ethnic and family tradition of what meals to cook and eat for me. This is part of my identity and lifestyle. The first issue is that diets do not even talk about meals, they talk about ingredients: meat, vegetables etc. are ingredients, a peas and chicken breast casserole in so-and-so sauce is a meal. So unless diets are meant for people who were always, no offense, eating boring as a family tradition, in a meat-and-two-vegs style, diets are weird. I am not eating meat or potatoes, they are merely the ingredients of the meals.
The same way you don’t eat “flour” or “wheat” or “grains” or “carbs”, you eat e.g. Italian sourdough bread from so-and-so bakery, so diets that talk about flour/wheat/grains/carbs get the inferential distance, the mental map completely wrong. They require a huge cognitive effort and facing unfamiliar and non-obvious thinking.
I mean, the point is here that diets want you to think bottom-up, you want to eat X ingredients and look for recipes for them. This is a huge distance from the usual, normal thinking, which is top-down, that you eat meal Y and buy whatever ingredients the recipe requires or buy the meal ready in a restaurant or somewhere and don’t even know the ingredients. (I can identify the cucumbers in my restaurant ordered Stroganoff but not sure if the other tidbit is mushrooms or what, example.)
Add to it the factor of finding out the ingredients in everything you did not cook yourself, from your aunt’s cake to the street hot dog (brown-bagging every work lunch is another “boring guy” territory to me, it is just too “anal” to not eat random things that are offered but carry your food supply the same way an astronaut carries oxygen supply).
Instead of all this weirdness, I manage my weight with 1) cutting down on vices, snacks, sugar soda (just drink coke zero) etc. stopped boozing etc. 2) intermittent fasting, as not-eating is never cognitively weird and probably autophagy is one of the most important parts of dietary health (read Eat Stop Eat). This is not an easy process either, I think I got to the point where the calories are right, so now the potential issue is micro-or macronutrient deficiencies.
My larger point is that any specific diet is merely an instance of the more generic class of being on diets, on being choosing and conscious about eating instead of drifting in a largely unconscious family and ethnic tradition, and I find that cognitively difficult and weird. However, it is a classic case of being the average of the five people you spend the most time with. If diets in general are normal in your subculture or culture, it is easy to adopt one, so basically your friends going pale can help you go vegan because they both are subsets of the whole choosy and conscious eating thing. If diets sound like some weird new sissy fashion to most people you spend time with and they make fun of “reform kitchen” and everybody just drifts in their ethnic and family tradition or whatever can be bought on the street, you will also find it hard.
(I should also say I am not longevity oriented because I find it hard to fill out time with goals. But the quality of the 60-65 years I roughly expect to spend alive does matter, hence the experiment with things like intermittent fasting.)
Disallowing certain ingredients does not restrict one’s range of recipes that much. That is how some traditional cuisines came to be, in countries where the local religions forbid certain types of foods. For example Islamic countries. They just found ways around pork and alcohol, and judging by the popularity of Middle Eastern cuisine, it’s not as if they’re any worse off for it. The same thing happened recently with vegetarian or vegan food. So many recipes are explicitly branded as vegan that it’s not difficult for a vegan person to find things to eat.
I find myself at the midpoint of the two approaches to eating. On one hand, I don’t have any specific ingredients which I altogether avoid for other reasons than the fact that I absolutely hate their taste or find the idea of them yucky. I rather avoid certain classes of meals than of ingredients. I find myself new stuff to eat by rummaging the internet for recipes, and then whatever those recipes demand, I add in my shopping basket next time I go shopping for groceries. I don’t need to diet, have gotten good at counting calories, and rely on that and on my own feeling of satiety to maintain my weight (as well as the trick of leaving home for hours at a time without eating out in town). I’ve tried cutting some stuff off my list of allowed foods (big classes of foods, such as everything sugary) and followed it successfully for months, then suddenly I started getting such strong cravings for the disallowed stuff and such a feeling of nausea when trying to continue eating my regular foods that I found it impossible and not worth it to continue.
On the other hand, this international, experimental way of cooking is absolutely completely not the way things are done around here. I always wind up with what my relatives regard as weird fancy gourmet food as opposed to the traditional food in my country. I mean, if I asked my grandma about quinoa or zucchini or persimmon or other such foreign-named stuff I eat, she’d just give me a blank stare. Besides, I do consciously avoid most processed food, push myself to eat more vegetables, and impose fairly strict limits on the caloric intakes I find acceptable, even when I’m not consciously monitoring everything I eat down to the tens of kcal. Otherwise, it’s pretty much just down to cravings.
I can’t say much about restaurant eating, though. It’s not a habit for me. I like cooking too much, and tipping, too little.
Mind elaborating on this a bit? Do you just stop eating entirely for X days, or limit yourself to very small amounts, or what? How hard do you find it to maintain? How effective is it?
I often find abstaining from something entirely to be much easier than attempting moderation; I’m sort of wondering if this might work for me, to more reliably drop the weight I usually put on around holidays.
Use Beeminder with a weight goal, eat whatever you like when you’re below the centerline, and stop eating entirely whenever you go above it, until you’re under it again.
This sounds like a fairly horrible idea. There is no guarantee that you will feel like doing fasting when you go above the centerline, if anything, you go above because you are in a bad mood and eat or drink to deal with it, so you would be fasting at times when it is the least convenient. Instead, you can simply fast whenever you feel it would be easy. Whenever you feel strong and happy and proud.
I do intermittent fasting by limiting my consumption of carbs and protein to a six hour window six or seven days a week. Other people might consume only water 2 or 3 days a week. A big goal of intermittent fasting is to promote autophagy.
So what do you eat what is not carbs and not protein? Steamed broccoli? Because I have recently learned even vegs like peas or carrots have carbs. This surprised me.
No, for X hours. X between 12 and 24, and the first 8 hours of it asleep. Zero solid food, but a little bit of milk in my coffe is a must, I cannot drink it otherwise.
Hardness goes away after about 12 hours. But the 8 to 12 hours are bad enough to call it hard and not do it that often. Hardness depends on many factors, mood, if alcohol was drunk the day before or not etc. I cannot tell the effectiveness of it yet, as I started it when I started to do other changes as well. I am losing weight, but not sure due to this.
Given “I adopted the diet myself in 2010”, I assume that’s the option that the poster implicitly favors, and the question is why more people do not do the same.
I find the whole idea of diets, as normally presented, weird. There is a cultural, ethnic and family tradition of what meals to cook and eat for me. This is part of my identity and lifestyle. The first issue is that diets do not even talk about meals, they talk about ingredients: meat, vegetables etc. are ingredients, a peas and chicken breast casserole in so-and-so sauce is a meal. So unless diets are meant for people who were always, no offense, eating boring as a family tradition, in a meat-and-two-vegs style, diets are weird. I am not eating meat or potatoes, they are merely the ingredients of the meals.
The same way you don’t eat “flour” or “wheat” or “grains” or “carbs”, you eat e.g. Italian sourdough bread from so-and-so bakery, so diets that talk about flour/wheat/grains/carbs get the inferential distance, the mental map completely wrong. They require a huge cognitive effort and facing unfamiliar and non-obvious thinking.
I mean, the point is here that diets want you to think bottom-up, you want to eat X ingredients and look for recipes for them. This is a huge distance from the usual, normal thinking, which is top-down, that you eat meal Y and buy whatever ingredients the recipe requires or buy the meal ready in a restaurant or somewhere and don’t even know the ingredients. (I can identify the cucumbers in my restaurant ordered Stroganoff but not sure if the other tidbit is mushrooms or what, example.)
Add to it the factor of finding out the ingredients in everything you did not cook yourself, from your aunt’s cake to the street hot dog (brown-bagging every work lunch is another “boring guy” territory to me, it is just too “anal” to not eat random things that are offered but carry your food supply the same way an astronaut carries oxygen supply).
Instead of all this weirdness, I manage my weight with 1) cutting down on vices, snacks, sugar soda (just drink coke zero) etc. stopped boozing etc. 2) intermittent fasting, as not-eating is never cognitively weird and probably autophagy is one of the most important parts of dietary health (read Eat Stop Eat). This is not an easy process either, I think I got to the point where the calories are right, so now the potential issue is micro-or macronutrient deficiencies.
My larger point is that any specific diet is merely an instance of the more generic class of being on diets, on being choosing and conscious about eating instead of drifting in a largely unconscious family and ethnic tradition, and I find that cognitively difficult and weird. However, it is a classic case of being the average of the five people you spend the most time with. If diets in general are normal in your subculture or culture, it is easy to adopt one, so basically your friends going pale can help you go vegan because they both are subsets of the whole choosy and conscious eating thing. If diets sound like some weird new sissy fashion to most people you spend time with and they make fun of “reform kitchen” and everybody just drifts in their ethnic and family tradition or whatever can be bought on the street, you will also find it hard.
(I should also say I am not longevity oriented because I find it hard to fill out time with goals. But the quality of the 60-65 years I roughly expect to spend alive does matter, hence the experiment with things like intermittent fasting.)
Disallowing certain ingredients does not restrict one’s range of recipes that much. That is how some traditional cuisines came to be, in countries where the local religions forbid certain types of foods. For example Islamic countries. They just found ways around pork and alcohol, and judging by the popularity of Middle Eastern cuisine, it’s not as if they’re any worse off for it. The same thing happened recently with vegetarian or vegan food. So many recipes are explicitly branded as vegan that it’s not difficult for a vegan person to find things to eat.
I find myself at the midpoint of the two approaches to eating. On one hand, I don’t have any specific ingredients which I altogether avoid for other reasons than the fact that I absolutely hate their taste or find the idea of them yucky. I rather avoid certain classes of meals than of ingredients. I find myself new stuff to eat by rummaging the internet for recipes, and then whatever those recipes demand, I add in my shopping basket next time I go shopping for groceries. I don’t need to diet, have gotten good at counting calories, and rely on that and on my own feeling of satiety to maintain my weight (as well as the trick of leaving home for hours at a time without eating out in town). I’ve tried cutting some stuff off my list of allowed foods (big classes of foods, such as everything sugary) and followed it successfully for months, then suddenly I started getting such strong cravings for the disallowed stuff and such a feeling of nausea when trying to continue eating my regular foods that I found it impossible and not worth it to continue.
On the other hand, this international, experimental way of cooking is absolutely completely not the way things are done around here. I always wind up with what my relatives regard as weird fancy gourmet food as opposed to the traditional food in my country. I mean, if I asked my grandma about quinoa or zucchini or persimmon or other such foreign-named stuff I eat, she’d just give me a blank stare. Besides, I do consciously avoid most processed food, push myself to eat more vegetables, and impose fairly strict limits on the caloric intakes I find acceptable, even when I’m not consciously monitoring everything I eat down to the tens of kcal. Otherwise, it’s pretty much just down to cravings.
I can’t say much about restaurant eating, though. It’s not a habit for me. I like cooking too much, and tipping, too little.
Mind elaborating on this a bit? Do you just stop eating entirely for X days, or limit yourself to very small amounts, or what? How hard do you find it to maintain? How effective is it?
I often find abstaining from something entirely to be much easier than attempting moderation; I’m sort of wondering if this might work for me, to more reliably drop the weight I usually put on around holidays.
Use Beeminder with a weight goal, eat whatever you like when you’re below the centerline, and stop eating entirely whenever you go above it, until you’re under it again.
This sounds like a fairly horrible idea. There is no guarantee that you will feel like doing fasting when you go above the centerline, if anything, you go above because you are in a bad mood and eat or drink to deal with it, so you would be fasting at times when it is the least convenient. Instead, you can simply fast whenever you feel it would be easy. Whenever you feel strong and happy and proud.
It’s worked for me so far.
I actually have such a goal, but hadn’t considered using it like this.
I do intermittent fasting by limiting my consumption of carbs and protein to a six hour window six or seven days a week. Other people might consume only water 2 or 3 days a week. A big goal of intermittent fasting is to promote autophagy.
So what do you eat what is not carbs and not protein? Steamed broccoli? Because I have recently learned even vegs like peas or carrots have carbs. This surprised me.
Bulletproof coffee=coffee+Butter from grass-fed cows+MCI oil.
Butter doesn’t have protein?
According to Wikipedia it has only 1 g protein and 0 carbs for 81g of fat.
How about sauerkraut? The carbs are fermented away before you eat it. Perhaps there are similar ways to cook other veggies like that.
No, for X hours. X between 12 and 24, and the first 8 hours of it asleep. Zero solid food, but a little bit of milk in my coffe is a must, I cannot drink it otherwise.
Hardness goes away after about 12 hours. But the 8 to 12 hours are bad enough to call it hard and not do it that often. Hardness depends on many factors, mood, if alcohol was drunk the day before or not etc. I cannot tell the effectiveness of it yet, as I started it when I started to do other changes as well. I am losing weight, but not sure due to this.